CFP: Queer Space (3/1/07; journal issue)

full name / name of organization:

Jane Garrity

contact email:

garrity@buffmail.Colorado.EDU

"Queer Space" (3/1/07: ELN Special Issue)

A respected forum since 1962 for new work in English literarystudies, ELN (English Language Notes) has undergone a change in editorship and an extensive makeover as a biannual journal devoted exclusively to special topics in allfields of literary and cultural studies. The new ELN is particularly determined to revive and reenergize its traditional commitment to featuring shorter notes,often no more than 3-4 pages in print, an attribute of the journal that will provide aunique forum for cutting-edge scholarly debate and exchange in the humanities.

Volume 45.2 of the new ELN (Fall/Winter 2007) seeks to make a radical intervention in the discourses of both spatiality and sexualitystudies. Contributors will explore gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer definitions of spacenot only in relation to the built environment but in response to a range ofboundaries and sites. We invite analyses of conceptual, geographical, discursive, virtual,and metaphoric understandings of queer space, welcoming in particularinterdisciplinary essays thatmove beyond extant work on the topic that deals primarily with maleexperience. Contributors may consider, for example, any of the following: how homosexual desire inverts or complicates the logic of inside/outside; howrepresentations of queer space intercede in the relations between visibility and power;how erotic connections construct a queer counter-public; how spaces such asstreets, sex clubs,tearooms, and parks complicate notions of public and private; how themeaning of interior design and domestic space shifts when considered in relation to the ideologies and institutions of sexuality; how intimate physical contact with geographical spaces offers refuge from the perceived tyranny ofheterosexuality; and how the mapping of a gay, lesbian, or bisexual subculture ontolocal, national, and international communities potentially reframes the categoriesof sex, gender, sexuality, nationality, and race. This ELN issue welcomesconsiderations of queerspace that provide more than strictly sexual definitions of the term, and move beyond arguments that disclaim "queer" either as excessively capacious orexclusionary (as it seeks to embrace readings of the ways women and lesbians occupy these spaces). By broadening the conceptual framework of spatiality and sexuality studies beyond the parameters that typically have definedit for the past decade, we aim to examine how the obsessions, anxieties, and taboos that characterize what we might call amoral sensual spaces come to belinked with gay and lesbian sensibilities.

The editors solicit original work that seeks to challenge heteronormative understandings of "space" while problematizing the term "queer."Position papers, notes, and essays of no longer than 20 manuscript pages are invitedon this subject from scholars in all fields of literary and cultural studies; theeditors would bedelighted to consider together two or more related contributions engaging one another on particular themes to be published as topical clusters.Book reviews on queer space topics are also welcome.